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Fall 08 Fall 08 LESTER LITERARY AGENCY & ASSOCIATES NON FICTION Spring 2019 Russia Ukraine Belarus HIGHLIGHTS HIGHLIGHTS 3 LITERARY REPORTAGE 8 CURRENT TOPICS 10 HISTORY 14 BIOGRAPHIES 19 CULTURAL ESSAYS 23 NATURE 27 ART / AESTHETICS 29 SOCIAL SCIENCES 32 TRUE STORIES/ MEMOIRS 33 SCIENCE 35 POPULAR SCIENCE 37 PSYCHOLOGY 40 EDUCATION & PARENTING 41 SELF-HELP 43 HEALTH & WELL BEING 44 NUTRITION 46 SPECIAL ILLUSTRATED PROJECTS 47 BESTSELLERS & BACKLIST 48 2 Lester Agency / Spring 2019 / Non Fiction Catalogue HIGHLIGHTS André Comte-Sponville Michel Onfray CONTRE LA PEUR ET CENT AUTRES SAGESSE PROPOS (Wisdom: Living at The Foot of a Volcano) (Against Fear and Other Writings) Albin Michel, January 2019, 528 pages Albin Michel, March 2019, 432 pages ◊ English sample available. ◊ Some thougths are directly inspired by the news, ◊ Rights sold in: Italy (Ponte alle Grazie). many focus on politics and economy, others ◊ Ongoing offers in Romania, Brazil, Spain. religion, spirituality, philosophy and literature. ◊ Currently n°1 in the French bestseller list! This sober, limpid anthology covers a great variety of subjects, with an echo effect and a perceivable ◊ 90,000 copies sold. progression of the author’s thinking. ◊ A philosophical peplum as well as a moral treatise. Sometimes current events become the pretext for vaster ◊ The Romans pre-Christian morals can be useful to our post-Christian times, because they answer reflections: the catastrophe of Fukushima opens a path to simply and clearly to existential questions. questioning of ecology; portraits of politicians lead to an investigation of the link between politics and truth, etc. ◊ This book is filled with these great little Roman André Comte-Sponville excels in this exercise, which he stories that enhance honour-based morals, the renders particularly effective. Effortlessly, readers penetrate polar opposite of Christian guilt. the secrets of everyday events and of today’s world by Sagesse explores the question of morals: we are living at following a guide that brings the basic challenges of philosophy within their grasp. the foot of a roaring volcano, how can we live and die with elegance? “By seeking the rules of the game with A walk through the news following the thread of a the Romans,” replies Michel Onfray. reflection that is philosophical, economic, political and moral, and above all, accessible to all readers. How is one to know how to behave in a society on the brink of collapse? By reading the Romans whose ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A humanist philosopher, André Comte- philosophy rely on examples rather than on whimsical Sponville has authored many books whose clarity and instructive theories! SAGESSE is a philosophical peplum in which we methods make philosophy accessible to all. His success has never assist to the death of Pliny the Elder, to gladiators combats, waned. Albin Michel published L’ESPRIT DE L’ATHÉISME (2006), to grand suicides, to banquets of ridiculous philosophers, to LE CAPITALISME EST-IL MORAL ? (2004, reprint 2008), LE sublime friendships and to assassinations that changed the GOÛT DE VIVRE (2010), LE SEXE NI LA MORT (2012), C’EST course of history. We befriend highly charismatic CHOSE TENDRE QUE LA VIE (Interviews with François L’Yvonnet, 2015). characters: Mucius Scaevola and his fiery coal, Regulus and his sewn eyelids, Cincinnatus and his plow, Lucretia and his dagger. But also, Seneca and Cicero, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. This book answers very pragmatic questions: How is one to make use of his time? How can one be strong while enduring pain? Is it possible to age gracefully? How can we apprehend death? Must we have children? What does it entail to keep our words? What does it mean to love? Can we be owners without being possessed? Should we get involve in politics? What does nature teach us? What does an ethic of honor entail? !Before any disaster hits us, we can always live as the romans did, by knowing how to stand tall. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michel Onfray, author of almost a hundred books, constructed his work around the themes of hedonism, atheism and the construction of the self. Today he is the best-known and appreciated French philosopher with a wide public. 3 HIGHLIGHTS Amin Maalouf Boris Cyrulnik LE NAUFRAGE DES CIVILISATIONS LA NUIT J’ÉCRIRAI DES SOLEILS (The Shipwreck Of Civilisations) (At Night, I Would Write Suns) Grasset, February 2019, 320 pages Odile Jacob, April 2019, 304 pages ◊ Amin Maalouf, a leading expert on both the West ◊ Alongside Genet, Tolstoy and many others, a and the East, is eminently worth listening to. His perceptive and sensitive exploration of resilience intuitions turn out to be accurate predictions, as through a few great works in our literary canon: demonstrates the prescience he has of the great how writing can sometimes save a life, how words secrets before they work their way into the enable one to escape, to flee reality, or to create universal consciousness. Twenty years ago he was oneself, to create a world, one’s own, or to fill a expressing his concern at the rise of Murderous void, or to tell one’s story... Identities, and ten years ago at the Deregulation of the World. After Psychothérapie de Dieu, a new big book by Boris Cyrulnik on the power of literature to overcome ◊ His intellectual arguments and analyses are fascinating, and this book could very well become misfortune, and on our irrepressible need for fiction to a classic. live Today Maalouf is convinced that we are on the “One writes to give shape to an uncertain world, to threshold of a global shipwreck whose impact will be felt escape the fog by illuminating a corner of our mental in every sphere of civilisation. This essay, born out of a world. The Second World War is the cause of my chaotic passion for world affairs and a sense of anxiety that has childhood. I now know, thanks to the intimate tales deep grown over the years, is a cry of alarm but not a down inside me, to the tales shared with a few close manifesto. friends, and to the tales that our culture tells about shattered childhoods, that it is still possible to ‘write suns.’ Although it remains the only superpower, America is in the process of losing all moral credibility. Europe, which offered Scarcity invites creativity, loss inspires art, being an orphan, its people and the rest of humanity the most ambitious and the writing of a novel. A life without action, without reassuring project of our time, is in the process of breaking encounters, and without a novel would be but an up. The Arab/Muslim world is embroiled in a profound existence without pleasure and without dreams, an icy chasm. This in part explains the frequency of orphans or of crisis that has plunged its people into despair and is having early separations among the creative population. calamitous repercussions for the whole planet. Major ‘emerging’ or ‘renascent’ nations such as China, India and Russia are taking a stand on the world stage in a toxic Indeed, among the great writers, how many were climate where self-interest and the law of the strongest orphaned children, neglected, rejected children, all of reign. A new arms race seems inevitable. Moreover, there whom battled loss with the written word? For them, the are serious threats (climate, environment, health) hanging simple act of writing changed the flavor of the world.” B. C. over the planet and with which we will be unable to deal ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Boris Cyrulnik is a neuropsychiatrist. He without the global solidarity that is so sorely lacking. For is the author of many books, all of them best-sellers, notably Un over half a century, the author has been travelling the merveilleux malheur; Sauve-toi, la vie t’appelle; and more recently world and observing it. He was in Saigon at the end of the , Psychothérapie de Dieu that has been translated into 10 Vietnam War and in Teheran when the Islamic Republic langugaes. Boris Cyrulnik’s books regularly sell more than 350,000 was ushered in. In this rich and powerful book, he is both copies. an engaged spectator and a thinker, blending stories and reflections. Sometimes he relates major events to which he happened to be one of the rare eye witnesses, and then he adopts the detached bird’s-eye view of the historian to explain to us how humankind has repeatedly drifted and now finds itself on the verge of a shipwreck. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Amin Maalouf has published many novels and essays, including the major critical and commercial ORIGINES, LE DÉRÈGLEMENT DU MONDE, UN FAUTEUIL SUR LA SEINE, and LES DÉSORIENTÉS. His works have been widely translated all around the world. 4 Lester Agency / Spring 2019 / Non Fiction Catalogue Grégoire Lois Arthur Lochmann QUAND LES OISEAUX NE CHANTENT PLUS LA VIE SOLIDE (When The Birds Stop Singing) (Solid Life: Carpentry as an Ethic for Doing) Fayard, April 2019, !250 pages Payot, January 2019, 204 pages ◊ Grégoire Loïs sounds the alarm. Against a ◊ Rights sold in: Italy (Ponte Alle Grazie). backdrop of environmental treaties, he gives us a deeply personal and subtle account of the species ◊ This learning story fused with humility intertwins that once were, those notably missing creatures, memories of creation and reflexions on the body, forgotten perhaps by humankind, the ghosts of an knowledge and the nature of work today. environment with no room for their song. ◊ The practice of carpentry as a means to You just need to go for a walk in the countryside to apprehend modern life in a serene manner. notice it: The birds have stopped singing. ◊ In a limpid and elegant style, Arthur Lochmann develops a material philosophy that helps give Rachel Carson’s 1962 prophecy of a silent spring is about direction to the frantic and fragmented era to be fulfilled, fifty years later and for the very same analysed by the German sociologist Zygmunt reasons, but with other, more highly effective means.